Cisco signs storage agreements

Cisco has inked agreements with EMC and StorageTek as the networking and storage worlds continue to converge. The two separate deals broaden the potential routes-to-market for the vendors involved and also allow the deployment of more comprehensive solutions.

Cisco has inked agreements with EMC and StorageTek as the networking and storage worlds continue to converge. The two separate deals broaden the potential routes-to-market for the vendors involved and also allow the deployment of more comprehensive solutions. StorageTek will start reselling Cisco’s MDS 9000 family of multiplayer intelligent directors and fabric switches and related SMARTnet services and support. The Cisco kit will be made available to StorageTek customers worldwide as part of the vendor’s storage networking solutions and services offering. Under the terms of the deal Cisco has also joined StorageTek’s TekSelect partner programme. The TekSelect partner programme is designed to meet customer demand for a single point of contact and support for integrated storage solutions. “Versatile and intelligent storage networks are a cornerstone for advancing the information lifecycle management (ILM) plans of our customers,” said JR Roedel, StorageTek senior director for ILM solutions. “This alliance with Cisco for intelligent storage networking systems is another step in the StorageTek journey to help our customers improve primary storage productivity, simplify backup and recovery, and enable a flexible compliance and archiving architecture for today and the future.” “Our networking solutions are tested and qualified by StorageTek to be compatible with their advanced enterprise storage solutions, enabling joint Cisco-StorageTek solutions to be quickly and easily deployed at customer sites worldwide,” said Ed Chapman, senior director of product management for the Cisco MDS 9000. Cisco has also announced an agreement with EMC that will see the two vendors provide customers with an end-to-end storage consolidation solution for remote-office data. By combining Cisco wide area file services technology with EMC network attached storage (NAS) kit, the two companies hope to offer customers an end-to-end file storage consolidation solution. EMC and Cisco plan to develop an OEM agreement, which will enable Cisco to sell and support the EMC NS Series and integrated NAS solutions. The integrated solution will be sold and supported by Cisco directly and also through its worldwide partner channel. “Both Cisco and EMC are strategic vendors of data centre solutions for enterprise and service provider customers globally,” said Luca Cafiero, senior vice president and general manager of the data centre, switching, storage and wireless technologies group at Cisco. “This agreement enables Cisco to offer a comprehensive network-enabled solution that spans customer requirements from the branch to the data center.” “Today's announcement is a natural extension of our ongoing partnering with Cisco to bring leading solutions to market that help our mutual customers manage information throughout its lifecycle and solve some of their most pressing business challenges,” said Howard Elias, executive VP of corporate marketing and office of technology at EMC. “The combination of technology from these two industry leaders will form a compelling enterprise-class data consolidation and management solution.”